Page 27 - A Complaint is a Gift Excerpt

A Complaint Is a Gift Strategy 25

agree with the policies that are stopping them from satisfying customers,
most customers don’t separate employee behavior from company policies.
Th e father of modem att ribution theory, Fritz Heider, notes that most of us
att ribute blame to individuals rather than the circumstances surrounding a
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product or service failure. For example, if a service provider says, “I know
this sounds ridiculous, but I need . . . ,” customers will likely think, “If it’s
ridiculous, then why are you asking for this information?”
Most service delivery today is complex, and a number of fi rms or
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individuals may have been involved in the service failure. Th is means
that service providers need to carefully explain what happened without
sounding as if they are att empting to pass blame onto someone else. Th ey
can probably accomplish this by saying, “I’m going to take responsibility
for this, even though several people were involved. We need to fi nd out
what happened so I can solve this problem for you.”
Wegmans Food Market, a popular chain in the upper northeastern
United States, operates under the promise “Every day you get our best,”
and that means “[we] will listen to your complaints so [we] can get bett er.”
Wegmans, founded in 1916, has won more than thirty signifi cant awards
for its uniqueness and customer service and for “changing the way we
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shop.” It won the 2007 Food Network Award for the Best Grocery Store.
And Wegmans has been named one of the one hundred best places to
work in America by Fortune magazine every year since the list started in
1988. It was number one in 2005, number two in 2006, and number three
in 2007. 9
Wegmans honors the implicit contract that customers assume has
been made: if they do not like what they purchased, if it does not meet
their needs, if it is substandard, or if they have changed their minds, they
are buying the right to say something about this. It asks for complaints
on its Web site; feedback forms are easy to fi ll out, and it is obvious
someone reads them. Th e site states clearly that a live person will address
the complaint and get back to the customer within a few days. We tried
it, and it works. Th e vice president of consumer aff airs, Mary Ellen
Burris, incorporates information about complaints into her weekly
columns, lett ing consumers know what Wegmans is doing about the